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World governments set out to slash wildlife crime

By Andy Coghlan

A GLOBAL coalition of nations vowed to stop the illegal trade in wildlife on 13 February. For the first time, wildlife crime was classed as a “serious crime”. This is welcome news but one key issue was overlooked&colon; cutting demand for products like rhino horn.

The declaration emerged from the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade.

Classing wildlife crime as serious is key, says John Robinson of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. “Suddenly, it becomes a ‘real’ crime.” Now countries can combat poaching with advanced crime-fighting resources usually reserved for crimes like arms trafficking.

The challenge is to prosecute the brokers, dealers and exporters who organise and finance trafficking. “Focusing on mules or poachers won’t work as they can easily be replaced,” says Davyth Stewart, coordinator of Interpol’s Natural Resources Unit in Lyon, France. “We need to catch the more senior people, the brokers, through undercover operations, monitoring telecommunications and financial transactions.”

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The challenge is to prosecute the brokers, dealers and exporters who organise the trafficking

Stewart says many syndicates involved in wildlife crime are also engaged in other forms of crime and trafficking. “We can use skill sets around financial crime and fraud, for example, and apply them to wildlife crime.” The declaration makes this a real possibility, says Robinson. “The same expertise used to combat other organised crime activities can be brought to bear against wildlife crime.”

But Robinson says the plan does not discuss strategies for cutting demand for products like rhino horn by demonising purchasers. Yet the latest evidence, presented at another conference on wildlife crime at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) last week, suggests such campaigns can slash trade in illegal wildlife products.

“Demand is the cause, and everything else is a symptom,” says Peter Knights of WildAid, a charity based in San Francisco. WildAid makes emotional videos that aim to dissuade people from buying illegal animal products.

A campaign against shark fin soup has cut consumption since it aired in 2009, according to unpublished data that Knights presented at ZSL. The campaign used a video in which former NBA basketball star Yao Ming turned down shark fin soup after seeing a bloodied shark with its fins cut off in a tank in the restaurant.

A survey in August 2013 of 1568 Chinese citizens revealed that 82 per cent of them had stopped eating shark fin soup, with most citing the campaign as the reason. The government banned shark fin soup from state banquets in December 2013. Knights says demand in China has fallen by 50 to 70 per cent and three major suppliers have closed down. WildAid is now running videos online in an attempt to reduce demand for rhino horn and ivory.

There is also a healthy interest in conservation issues in China, says digital marketing consultant Eric Phu, based in Sydney, Australia. He searched for discussions on conservation in 1.2 million conversations on Sina Weibo, a Chinese website akin to Twitter, in the first half of 2013.

Conservation was the hottest topic, with 211,000 conversations. Animal welfare was next with 48,000. Air pollution got just 20,652, despite its huge impact in China last year. Only 1566 were about buying ivory, suggesting most Chinese people didn’t want to.

We know we can make consumption unacceptable, because it has been done before, says Tom Milliken of TRAFFIC in Cambridge, UK. In the 1980s, Japan was the leading consumer of ivory, importing 500 tonnes – equivalent to 26,000 elephants – in 1983 alone. But imports halted almost overnight in 1993, when the US imposed sanctions on China and Taiwan in a bid to stem trade in illegal wildlife products.

But cutting demand for such products may take years. Meanwhile, the fight against poachers and gangs continues. At least new technologies can help in the fight and allow animal populations to recover.

A system called Spatial Monitoring and Report Tool (SMART), produced by a coalition of conservation groups, helps rangers record key data while on patrol. They photograph animal carcasses with their cellphones, and log evidence of poacher camps and snares, while their locations are automatically logged by GPS. The data is then used to plan patrol routes, for instance, targeting poaching hotspots.

SMART, and its predecessor, MIST (Management Information SysTem), have made a big difference in the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand. Its tiger population rose from 46 to 75 between 2007 and 2013, says Anak Pattanavibool of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bangkok. And the number of poaching camps that rangers found per 100 kilometres trekked has halved.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Poaching on a par with arms trade”